It seems that the/. community has had no trouble in uncovering exactly what this bug is. Why is it so difficult for MS? It's not as if this isn't a known issue with a known workaround. Under those circumstances you fix the bug. I don't see why some people have such a problem with that. It's not even a newly-discovered issue either: the MS article is dated 15 March.
This is, by all accounts, a *bug*. It's not as though they did this on purpose or to prove a point.
Didn't they? They wrote code that limits access in a strange way that can only work if hosts accept malformed datagrams. I suppose it's possible to do that by accident, but I can't see how. But OK, it's a bug. They should fix it instead of pretending they don't know what's going on. "If only they'd be more forthcoming," they whine. Bullshit. We know perfectly well what's going on; MS must know aw well. They don't want to fix it, they want to make the ISP use a workaround.
The only party trying to prove a point is the ISP and they're doing at the expensive of their customers because they don't have any competition.
Since the point is that once a bug is identified you ought to fix it instead of pretending you don't understand what the bug is, then yes I support it. If I treated my users like MS treated their and refused to fix bugs that interfered with their work, I'd be out of a job.
As someone who lives in a remote area out in the country, I assure you that the propane truck shows up rather more often than twice a year. And as a California resident who used to have an electric hot-water heater, I assure you that it was much cheaper to go with propane until past couple of years, when it became close to a wash.
You don't have any courtesy to trade, as you so deftly demonstrated by equating a basic understanding of energy with going to the prom. So sorry, but no deal. You're going to have to learn basic scientific facts on your own. (English, too. You want the intransitive verb "stagnate"; "stagnant" is the related adjective.) It was a nice attempt at distraction despite being so wide of the mark it had no chance of scoring, but that doesn't make you any better informed.
I'm trying to fathom what kind thought lies behind an attempt to demonstrate his political knowledge by proclaiming the presidential candidate he supports. If you're trying to impress me by naming the one Republican candidate who isn't a carbon copy of all the rest, (aside from McCain, who doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell) it's not working. And as for Paul being a Constitutionalist (whatever that's supposed to mean. Everyone claims to support the Constitution. What you want is a particular reading of it), he's a Libertarian, which was the ballot on which he ran for president the last time he tried. Exactly the political philosophy I'd expect from someone who don't know nothin' 'bout history.
TFA was a NASA press release, presumably aimed at adults, and the phrase in question was taken from it. It's one thing if/. felt the need to explain this to younger readers, but I think this is just something an adult who buys electricity should know.
So you're saying you forgot everything you learned in high school. That means most of American history. (Or British history, or Eritrean history, or wherever it is you come from.) I sure as hell hope you don't vote, because you obviously have insufficient background knowledge to make civic-minded decisions about anything.
No, I don't know the brand names of the chips in my car any more than I know the manufacturers of the light switches in my house. But I do know how fuel injection works, along with how my car works in general terms, and what might go wrong with it. The result is that I'm never mystified about what my car is doing, and on those very rare occasions when I have to take it to a mechanic it's impossible for him to cheat me.
Knowledge is good. I suggest you acquire and retain some.
I also suggest you review the tagline of this site. Electricity is something nerds are supposed to know about.
Don't be silly. For one thing, I don't speak l33t. For another, the benefit of knowing how something you're paying for is being measured is key to understanding how to economize if you feel the need. For example, if you're trying to decide between a propane and electric hot-water heater, you'll want the one that's cheaper to run. They tell you an estimate of the cost, but that's based on average rates and usage. You can get a much better idea if you understand your own usage pattern and how that would translate into energy usage and therefore costs.
And for another, yes, you can get at least a rough idea of your average electricity use. Figuring your load as a back-of-the-envelope calculation isn't hard, and it will help you detect if your bill is way off for some reason. The electric company does make mistakes you know. Or you might have some energy leakage you don't know about otherwise.
"Researched it"? How old are you? This is high school-level knowledge. To be blunt, it's nothing short of idiotic to be paying for something where you don't understand what it is you're paying for or how it's measured. Your electric bill shows you how much energy you've used in kilowatt-hours. If you've been paying it every month without knowing what a kilowatt-hour is, you might as well pay for gasoline without knowing the size of a [litre|gallon].
It really does no good for you to describe a system on a high level, abstracting the levels beneath it, and then pretend that there's nothing of any complexity going on in them. You have not defined what an "object" is, but in modern computer science it has a fairly specific meaning: an instantiation of an abstract set of characteristics, among them behaviors expressed algorithmically. Yes, the way in which it interacts with other objects may be subject to changes in its "environment" but there's more to computing than interaction among objects. Even your example of occam, which was a language and not a computer itself, was procedural.
What you're missing in your insistence that hardware is more complex yet more reliable than software is that software is really nothing more than a simple abstraction of what's going on in the hardware, which conceals a great deal of complexity for the sake of conceptual clarity. But those lower layers aren't really absent and can't always be ignored.
This whole idea comes across as the naive theories of someone who has not done a great variety of work. Any time I've ever encountered someone who thought a complex or intractable problem has some simple solution that everyone but that person has overlooked, he's been wrong, sometimes obviously and dramatically.
So first you say that class mobility is a hoax, and then when I give you a concrete and fairly common example you change your story to say it's not fast enough. Of course it takes time. No one ever said it didn't, and I don't know by what standard your "too long" comes from there. The movies? If you want instant gratification in that area, you need to win the lottery. Otherwise, you work at it. If you can't make a better life for yourself, you can at least make one for your children. But even a hundred years is fast to someone coming from a situation where class mobility of any kind was next to impossible.
You're really attacking a strawman here. Yes, the American Dream is about "rags to riches", but riches compared to what? Compared to the situation of the European peasant, American middle class prosperity looked an awful lot like wealth. Even today, by the standards of most of the world's population our lower-middle class lives very comfortably. There aren't many people in the US, as a fraction of the population, who need to worry about where their next meal is coming from. That even a few should have that worry is too many in a country like this one, which throws away enough food to keep all of our hungry fed and then some. If you want to look for social failure then look there, not at the failure of instant gratification for class mobility. That frankly smells more of jealousy toward the super-rich than anything else. (It's not a zero-sum game anyway. Bill Gates' billions don't make me any poorer, or prevent me from making billions on my own.)
Actually, it took less time than 120 years for my family to reach upper-middle class. It was by and large achieved by my father's generation, as is clear from what I said about their work. If the ability to afford "a few luxuries" is how you measure entry to that class then it was my grandparents who made it, unless you have an unreasonably high standard about what constitutes a luxury. But I don't think that's a reliable measure. If "middle class" means anything, it points to a certain level of comfort, and comfort implies at least some minor luxuries.
Yes, morally and ideally pay parity for women ought to have been achieved yesterday. In the real world, it wasn't going to happen. Real people don't behave according to ideal morals, even those they espouse.
This is flat-out untrue. My family on both sides were immigrants who arrived in the US in the late 1880s. I'll just trace what happened on my father's side.
The original immigrants, my great-grandparents, were oil refinery workers. That meant they had it relatively good, I admit -- most of the immigrants of the time from their ethnic group were coal miners.
My grandfather started out as an ordinary refinery worker, and through sheer hard work rose to management. He was, unfortunately, forced into a premature retirement in the early 1960s. His employer, Esso (now Exxon), decided to try out their new computers and reconcile their employee records, which is how they discovered he never had more than an 8th grade education but was doing a job that required at least a BA in Business Administration. My grandmother was a housewife, not counting her work as a child laborer in a silk mill. This was a common situation for women of her class and time, but her younger sister's career was not. She was the first woman to hold a management position at Western Electric. My grandmother's younger brothers were of an age to fight in WWII; they went to college on the GI Bill and ended up as professionals.
My father's generation all went to college, including his sister although she had no career in mind and became a housewife. This was again fairly typical for her time. The others were all professionals of one kind or another. It's noteworthy that it was only at this time that my family began to speak English at home. My father was the first to know the language before attending public school; his two older siblings and everyone who came before him did not.
My generation were all college educated if they wanted to be, which I think amounted to all of us but one. We are all, both men and women, academics, professionals, and business owners.
In four generations we rose from a class where it was not customary to be educated at all to the upper middle class of the United States, not because we were privileged in any way but because of a dedication to making a better life for descendants. And one or two generations before that? At least on my grandfather's side we were serfs; slaves in all but name. In the part of Europe we came from, serfdom was not abolished until almost 1850.
Taking the long view, insisting on instant equality is asking much. Should women be paid the same as men for the same work? Absolutely. But look at that timeline. My family was in this country for 80 years before it was usual for women to be employed outside the home. Women weren't even allowed to vote when my great-grandmother got off the boat at Ellis Island, and they were not enfranchised until 30 years later. In another 40 years a college education finally became almost as common for women as it was for men; another 40 years later the situation has actually reversed. It would be a bad thing if the injustice of sex-based pay inequity took another generation to be fully corrected, but relatively speaking there are far more oppressive injustices around than that. (At least now it's universally acknowledged that equal pay ought to be given for equal work regardless of sex. That wasn't a given not so long ago. Modern reactionaries who want to argue that there really is no injustice here are forced to the position that women usually don't do equal work, an absurdity on its face.)
There are a number of cultural issues standing in the way of minorities today, but a determination to make a better life can overcome just about anything. Perhaps my perceptions are skewed: the manager who hired me into the company where I now work was black ("was" because he retired since) and I've almost always had black co-workers. Not one of them was born into the middle class. They simply didn't give up until they achieved what they wanted, often in the face of opposition from all sides. Had they accepted that being born poor doomed them to poverty their entire lives, I'd have never met them let alone worked for them.
My own family is proof that even a language barrier need never be a serious obstacle.
So go ahead. Tell me it's a hoax. Just don't expect me to believe it.
So? That's as it should be. New ideas that seek to replace well-established models ought to have a high barrier to entrance, especially when those ideas are solutions for which there are no clear problems. The Relativity theories made a number of predictions that were not observed for many years. It's only in the past few weeks that frame dragging was confirmed.
People have always lived in communities, settled or not, and some of the most ancient monuments we have are observatories or carefully built to astronomical alignments. (cf Stonehenge) It may not have affected their daily lives, but they clearly gave the matter some thought, and every ancient mythology I know of possessed a cosmology where the earth was described as having one shape or another. For example, the model implied in Genesis 1, with a flat earth surmounted by a solid "firmament", surrounded by the primeval "waters", shares many commonalities with the mythologies of the Fertile Crescent.
No, you can't deduce what a majority of our ancestors thought about the shape of the earth from a selection of citations. What can be shown is that the correct shape was known by at least a few from Classical Antiquity on, but that various opinions were held until at least the 4th century and almost certainly later. The Wikipedia article on the subject summarizes it well.
I'm not certain what your point is about peer reviews. It doesn't change the fact that the method generally works and that bad theories are weeded out sooner or later. Very occasionally this is later, but that's life. And it's still true that a scientist in a particular field is better placed to understand the data than a scientist outside that field, let alone the general public. The latter in particular is primarily and generally led by factors that have nothing do to with science, which is not true for a specialist.
Einstein, like any scientist then or now, published in peer-review journals and not on the Internet, even while he worked as a patent clerk. Of course his ideas were controversial. All new ideas are. I really don't see your point here. Denier of what?
Our ancestors did believe in a flat earth. They were just more remote ancestors than is often represented.
I'm not certain what your subject line has to do with your post. What is meant by "scientific consensus" isn't a preponderance in popular thought, but the opinions of the scientific community working in the discipline under consideration, who are capable of taking the available data into account, understanding it, and forming an educated opinion based on it.
The problem here is that global warming is not your run-of-the-mill science. The data seem to indicate a catastrophic worldwide flooding of coastal regions, large-scale extinctions, and drastic climate change, all with dire consequences for large populations of people. There's very little else in science apart from nuclear physics with such far-reaching political implications. But unlike nuclear physics, where only the technology based on the science is politically significant, the effects of which are clear to all, in climatology it's the results of data analysis itself that has impact, and these results are only obtainable for a small minority. Considering the potential risks, it is patently unwise for the political reaction to be decided by the uninformed majority.
The risk exists whether global warming is a serious threat or not. If it is, and nothing is done, the effects will be as I describe above. If it is not, and a worldwide emergency effort is undertaken to mitigate it, the economic effects could be devastating in some areas.
It makes technical sense, sure. But it makes no sense at all in terms of civil liberties. The reactions to the ruling described in TFA indicate that the judge did not distinguish between information that might be logged as a matter of course in normal IT practice and other information. So according to this judge, *anything* that passes through your computer's RAM is legally a "document" and can therefore be preserved by court order. This could potentially include anything from keystrokes during gameplay, to a calculation you performed with a "calculator" program, to a letter you wrote but decided not to save. That's more than a little disturbing.
That's one of those remarks that means something totally different when placed into context. He wasn't talking about PCs, he was talking about the kind of computer for running a Jetson's-like house with everything automated and centrally controlled. See http://www.ken-jennings.com/blog/?p=303.
I think it should be easy to get kids to understand that a scientist's job is to find out about how the world works. Beyond that, the best advice you have received here is to 1) Show them in concrete terms what it is you investigate; 2) Avoid jargon, don't try to teach vocabulary, and express ideas in elementary terms; 3) Make it fun so as to engage them.
I buy my coffee from a local roaster which never sells beans that were roasted more than 4 days ago. They also carry a number of varieties that aren't so common anywhere else. My favorite is the Harrar, which is Ethiopian but very different from the more common Yirgacheffe. There are very distinct notes of blueberry -- when it's been given a light roast. Roasted dark there's nothing special about it.
At home I brew using a vacuum brewer. They have the advantage that the water is always the right temperature just by the nature of the process -- and also, it's just plain nifty in a geeky kind of way. The disadvantage is that the coffee needs to have a very uniform grind. Some are more sensitive to this than others -- my Bodum Santos is moreso than most -- so the cheapo blade grinders don't work well. You need something like the KitchenAid burr grinder. But the coffee they make is very good.
They can't avoid it forever though, and they need to do it before any lawsuits they bring go very far. It's a requirement that a patent holder claiming infringement inform infringers exactly how they are doing that. Refusal to do so is considered a bad faith act on the part of the plaintiff, which is a serious strike against any damages they might want to claim.
No? Are you really sure about this, or is it merely some conjecture about what would be "fair" that you just pulled out of your ass?
Gee, why don't you ask OP, who said exactly the same thing? Or are you just a drive-by asshole?
I also looked at it from the direction of who normally pays for the right to use a patent. That would be the manufacturer/distributor/etc., not their customers. The customers pay the part of the licensing cost as a matter of course, but it's indistinguishable from any other cost of doing business that gets bundled into the selling price. Probably meaningless, but also little do do with "fair".
There are also practical considerations, as even a cursory reading of 35 U.S.C. 287 should make obvious to all but the densest. They can't possibly go after every Linux user. They'll go after the big commercial users, if anyone.
In the best of all possible worlds, the end result of this will be the invalidation of all software patents. So it could be a very good thing. But I'm not holding my breath.
And what's with not being specific as to the patents? More SCO-like nonsense. They're afraid of giving people time to "open source" the defense using something like Groklaw to rally around.
I'm sure that's it. Look at how well this strategy worked for SCO...
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that the /. community has had no trouble in uncovering exactly what this bug is. Why is it so difficult for MS? It's not as if this isn't a known issue with a known workaround. Under those circumstances you fix the bug. I don't see why some people have such a problem with that. It's not even a newly-discovered issue either: the MS article is dated 15 March.
I think you've just discovered an entirely new method of performing circumcision.
As someone who lives in a remote area out in the country, I assure you that the propane truck shows up rather more often than twice a year. And as a California resident who used to have an electric hot-water heater, I assure you that it was much cheaper to go with propane until past couple of years, when it became close to a wash.
You don't have any courtesy to trade, as you so deftly demonstrated by equating a basic understanding of energy with going to the prom. So sorry, but no deal. You're going to have to learn basic scientific facts on your own. (English, too. You want the intransitive verb "stagnate"; "stagnant" is the related adjective.) It was a nice attempt at distraction despite being so wide of the mark it had no chance of scoring, but that doesn't make you any better informed.
I'm trying to fathom what kind thought lies behind an attempt to demonstrate his political knowledge by proclaiming the presidential candidate he supports. If you're trying to impress me by naming the one Republican candidate who isn't a carbon copy of all the rest, (aside from McCain, who doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell) it's not working. And as for Paul being a Constitutionalist (whatever that's supposed to mean. Everyone claims to support the Constitution. What you want is a particular reading of it), he's a Libertarian, which was the ballot on which he ran for president the last time he tried. Exactly the political philosophy I'd expect from someone who don't know nothin' 'bout history.
TFA was a NASA press release, presumably aimed at adults, and the phrase in question was taken from it. It's one thing if /. felt the need to explain this to younger readers, but I think this is just something an adult who buys electricity should know.
You're bitter about something. I can tell.
So you're saying you forgot everything you learned in high school. That means most of American history. (Or British history, or Eritrean history, or wherever it is you come from.) I sure as hell hope you don't vote, because you obviously have insufficient background knowledge to make civic-minded decisions about anything.
No, I don't know the brand names of the chips in my car any more than I know the manufacturers of the light switches in my house. But I do know how fuel injection works, along with how my car works in general terms, and what might go wrong with it. The result is that I'm never mystified about what my car is doing, and on those very rare occasions when I have to take it to a mechanic it's impossible for him to cheat me.
Knowledge is good. I suggest you acquire and retain some.
I also suggest you review the tagline of this site. Electricity is something nerds are supposed to know about.
My, aren't we crabby today?
Don't be silly. For one thing, I don't speak l33t. For another, the benefit of knowing how something you're paying for is being measured is key to understanding how to economize if you feel the need. For example, if you're trying to decide between a propane and electric hot-water heater, you'll want the one that's cheaper to run. They tell you an estimate of the cost, but that's based on average rates and usage. You can get a much better idea if you understand your own usage pattern and how that would translate into energy usage and therefore costs.
And for another, yes, you can get at least a rough idea of your average electricity use. Figuring your load as a back-of-the-envelope calculation isn't hard, and it will help you detect if your bill is way off for some reason. The electric company does make mistakes you know. Or you might have some energy leakage you don't know about otherwise.
I have somehow retained the dregs of my youthful idealism. It never fails to disappoint.
"Researched it"? How old are you? This is high school-level knowledge. To be blunt, it's nothing short of idiotic to be paying for something where you don't understand what it is you're paying for or how it's measured. Your electric bill shows you how much energy you've used in kilowatt-hours. If you've been paying it every month without knowing what a kilowatt-hour is, you might as well pay for gasoline without knowing the size of a [litre|gallon].
It really does no good for you to describe a system on a high level, abstracting the levels beneath it, and then pretend that there's nothing of any complexity going on in them. You have not defined what an "object" is, but in modern computer science it has a fairly specific meaning: an instantiation of an abstract set of characteristics, among them behaviors expressed algorithmically. Yes, the way in which it interacts with other objects may be subject to changes in its "environment" but there's more to computing than interaction among objects. Even your example of occam, which was a language and not a computer itself, was procedural.
What you're missing in your insistence that hardware is more complex yet more reliable than software is that software is really nothing more than a simple abstraction of what's going on in the hardware, which conceals a great deal of complexity for the sake of conceptual clarity. But those lower layers aren't really absent and can't always be ignored.
This whole idea comes across as the naive theories of someone who has not done a great variety of work. Any time I've ever encountered someone who thought a complex or intractable problem has some simple solution that everyone but that person has overlooked, he's been wrong, sometimes obviously and dramatically.
So first you say that class mobility is a hoax, and then when I give you a concrete and fairly common example you change your story to say it's not fast enough. Of course it takes time. No one ever said it didn't, and I don't know by what standard your "too long" comes from there. The movies? If you want instant gratification in that area, you need to win the lottery. Otherwise, you work at it. If you can't make a better life for yourself, you can at least make one for your children. But even a hundred years is fast to someone coming from a situation where class mobility of any kind was next to impossible.
You're really attacking a strawman here. Yes, the American Dream is about "rags to riches", but riches compared to what? Compared to the situation of the European peasant, American middle class prosperity looked an awful lot like wealth. Even today, by the standards of most of the world's population our lower-middle class lives very comfortably. There aren't many people in the US, as a fraction of the population, who need to worry about where their next meal is coming from. That even a few should have that worry is too many in a country like this one, which throws away enough food to keep all of our hungry fed and then some. If you want to look for social failure then look there, not at the failure of instant gratification for class mobility. That frankly smells more of jealousy toward the super-rich than anything else. (It's not a zero-sum game anyway. Bill Gates' billions don't make me any poorer, or prevent me from making billions on my own.)
Actually, it took less time than 120 years for my family to reach upper-middle class. It was by and large achieved by my father's generation, as is clear from what I said about their work. If the ability to afford "a few luxuries" is how you measure entry to that class then it was my grandparents who made it, unless you have an unreasonably high standard about what constitutes a luxury. But I don't think that's a reliable measure. If "middle class" means anything, it points to a certain level of comfort, and comfort implies at least some minor luxuries.
Yes, morally and ideally pay parity for women ought to have been achieved yesterday. In the real world, it wasn't going to happen. Real people don't behave according to ideal morals, even those they espouse.
This is flat-out untrue. My family on both sides were immigrants who arrived in the US in the late 1880s. I'll just trace what happened on my father's side.
The original immigrants, my great-grandparents, were oil refinery workers. That meant they had it relatively good, I admit -- most of the immigrants of the time from their ethnic group were coal miners.
My grandfather started out as an ordinary refinery worker, and through sheer hard work rose to management. He was, unfortunately, forced into a premature retirement in the early 1960s. His employer, Esso (now Exxon), decided to try out their new computers and reconcile their employee records, which is how they discovered he never had more than an 8th grade education but was doing a job that required at least a BA in Business Administration. My grandmother was a housewife, not counting her work as a child laborer in a silk mill. This was a common situation for women of her class and time, but her younger sister's career was not. She was the first woman to hold a management position at Western Electric. My grandmother's younger brothers were of an age to fight in WWII; they went to college on the GI Bill and ended up as professionals.
My father's generation all went to college, including his sister although she had no career in mind and became a housewife. This was again fairly typical for her time. The others were all professionals of one kind or another. It's noteworthy that it was only at this time that my family began to speak English at home. My father was the first to know the language before attending public school; his two older siblings and everyone who came before him did not.
My generation were all college educated if they wanted to be, which I think amounted to all of us but one. We are all, both men and women, academics, professionals, and business owners.
In four generations we rose from a class where it was not customary to be educated at all to the upper middle class of the United States, not because we were privileged in any way but because of a dedication to making a better life for descendants. And one or two generations before that? At least on my grandfather's side we were serfs; slaves in all but name. In the part of Europe we came from, serfdom was not abolished until almost 1850.
Taking the long view, insisting on instant equality is asking much. Should women be paid the same as men for the same work? Absolutely. But look at that timeline. My family was in this country for 80 years before it was usual for women to be employed outside the home. Women weren't even allowed to vote when my great-grandmother got off the boat at Ellis Island, and they were not enfranchised until 30 years later. In another 40 years a college education finally became almost as common for women as it was for men; another 40 years later the situation has actually reversed. It would be a bad thing if the injustice of sex-based pay inequity took another generation to be fully corrected, but relatively speaking there are far more oppressive injustices around than that. (At least now it's universally acknowledged that equal pay ought to be given for equal work regardless of sex. That wasn't a given not so long ago. Modern reactionaries who want to argue that there really is no injustice here are forced to the position that women usually don't do equal work, an absurdity on its face.)
There are a number of cultural issues standing in the way of minorities today, but a determination to make a better life can overcome just about anything. Perhaps my perceptions are skewed: the manager who hired me into the company where I now work was black ("was" because he retired since) and I've almost always had black co-workers. Not one of them was born into the middle class. They simply didn't give up until they achieved what they wanted, often in the face of opposition from all sides. Had they accepted that being born poor doomed them to poverty their entire lives, I'd have never met them let alone worked for them.
My own family is proof that even a language barrier need never be a serious obstacle.
So go ahead. Tell me it's a hoax. Just don't expect me to believe it.
So? That's as it should be. New ideas that seek to replace well-established models ought to have a high barrier to entrance, especially when those ideas are solutions for which there are no clear problems. The Relativity theories made a number of predictions that were not observed for many years. It's only in the past few weeks that frame dragging was confirmed.
People have always lived in communities, settled or not, and some of the most ancient monuments we have are observatories or carefully built to astronomical alignments. (cf Stonehenge) It may not have affected their daily lives, but they clearly gave the matter some thought, and every ancient mythology I know of possessed a cosmology where the earth was described as having one shape or another. For example, the model implied in Genesis 1, with a flat earth surmounted by a solid "firmament", surrounded by the primeval "waters", shares many commonalities with the mythologies of the Fertile Crescent.
I'm not certain what your point is about peer reviews. It doesn't change the fact that the method generally works and that bad theories are weeded out sooner or later. Very occasionally this is later, but that's life. And it's still true that a scientist in a particular field is better placed to understand the data than a scientist outside that field, let alone the general public. The latter in particular is primarily and generally led by factors that have nothing do to with science, which is not true for a specialist.
Einstein, like any scientist then or now, published in peer-review journals and not on the Internet, even while he worked as a patent clerk. Of course his ideas were controversial. All new ideas are. I really don't see your point here. Denier of what?
Our ancestors did believe in a flat earth. They were just more remote ancestors than is often represented.
I'm not certain what your subject line has to do with your post. What is meant by "scientific consensus" isn't a preponderance in popular thought, but the opinions of the scientific community working in the discipline under consideration, who are capable of taking the available data into account, understanding it, and forming an educated opinion based on it.
The problem here is that global warming is not your run-of-the-mill science. The data seem to indicate a catastrophic worldwide flooding of coastal regions, large-scale extinctions, and drastic climate change, all with dire consequences for large populations of people. There's very little else in science apart from nuclear physics with such far-reaching political implications. But unlike nuclear physics, where only the technology based on the science is politically significant, the effects of which are clear to all, in climatology it's the results of data analysis itself that has impact, and these results are only obtainable for a small minority. Considering the potential risks, it is patently unwise for the political reaction to be decided by the uninformed majority.
The risk exists whether global warming is a serious threat or not. If it is, and nothing is done, the effects will be as I describe above. If it is not, and a worldwide emergency effort is undertaken to mitigate it, the economic effects could be devastating in some areas.
It makes technical sense, sure. But it makes no sense at all in terms of civil liberties. The reactions to the ruling described in TFA indicate that the judge did not distinguish between information that might be logged as a matter of course in normal IT practice and other information. So according to this judge, *anything* that passes through your computer's RAM is legally a "document" and can therefore be preserved by court order. This could potentially include anything from keystrokes during gameplay, to a calculation you performed with a "calculator" program, to a letter you wrote but decided not to save. That's more than a little disturbing.
That's one of those remarks that means something totally different when placed into context. He wasn't talking about PCs, he was talking about the kind of computer for running a Jetson's-like house with everything automated and centrally controlled. See http://www.ken-jennings.com/blog/?p=303.
I think it should be easy to get kids to understand that a scientist's job is to find out about how the world works. Beyond that, the best advice you have received here is to 1) Show them in concrete terms what it is you investigate; 2) Avoid jargon, don't try to teach vocabulary, and express ideas in elementary terms; 3) Make it fun so as to engage them.
I buy my coffee from a local roaster which never sells beans that were roasted more than 4 days ago. They also carry a number of varieties that aren't so common anywhere else. My favorite is the Harrar, which is Ethiopian but very different from the more common Yirgacheffe. There are very distinct notes of blueberry -- when it's been given a light roast. Roasted dark there's nothing special about it.
At home I brew using a vacuum brewer. They have the advantage that the water is always the right temperature just by the nature of the process -- and also, it's just plain nifty in a geeky kind of way. The disadvantage is that the coffee needs to have a very uniform grind. Some are more sensitive to this than others -- my Bodum Santos is moreso than most -- so the cheapo blade grinders don't work well. You need something like the KitchenAid burr grinder. But the coffee they make is very good.
They can't avoid it forever though, and they need to do it before any lawsuits they bring go very far. It's a requirement that a patent holder claiming infringement inform infringers exactly how they are doing that. Refusal to do so is considered a bad faith act on the part of the plaintiff, which is a serious strike against any damages they might want to claim.
Gee, why don't you ask OP, who said exactly the same thing? Or are you just a drive-by asshole?
I also looked at it from the direction of who normally pays for the right to use a patent. That would be the manufacturer/distributor/etc., not their customers. The customers pay the part of the licensing cost as a matter of course, but it's indistinguishable from any other cost of doing business that gets bundled into the selling price. Probably meaningless, but also little do do with "fair".
There are also practical considerations, as even a cursory reading of 35 U.S.C. 287 should make obvious to all but the densest. They can't possibly go after every Linux user. They'll go after the big commercial users, if anyone.
In the best of all possible worlds, the end result of this will be the invalidation of all software patents. So it could be a very good thing. But I'm not holding my breath.
And what's with not being specific as to the patents? More SCO-like nonsense. They're afraid of giving people time to "open source" the defense using something like Groklaw to rally around.
I'm sure that's it. Look at how well this strategy worked for SCO...